and kept making such
unnatural faces, and at first all he would say was that he'd eaten a
little piece of apple and thought it must have some microbes on it. But
he got sicker and sicker, and we put him to bed--and then we all thought
he was going to die--and, of COURSE, no little piece of apple would
have--well, and he kept getting worse and then he said he'd had a
dollar. He said he'd spent it for the concertina, and watermelon, and
chocolate-creams, and licorice sticks, and lemon-drops, and peanuts,
and jaw-breakers, and sardines, and raspberry lemonade, and pickles, and
popcorn, and ice-cream, and cider, and sausage--there was sausage in
his pocket, and mamma says his jacket is ruined--and cinnamon drops--and
waffles--and he ate four or five lobster croquettes at lunch--and papa
said, 'Who gave you that dollar?' Only he didn't say 'WHO'--he said
something horrible, Bob! And Penrod thought he was going to die, and he
said you gave it to him, and oh! it was just pitiful to hear the poor
child, Bob, because he thought he was dying, you see, and he blamed you
for the whole thing. He said if you'd only let him alone and not given
it to him, he'd have grown up to be a good man--and now he couldn't! I
never heard anything so heart-rending--he was so weak he could hardly
whisper, but he kept trying to talk, telling us over and over it was all
your fault."

In the darkness Mr. Williams' facial expression could not be seen, but
his voice sounded hopeful.

"Is he--is he still in a great deal of pain?"

"They say the crisis is past," said Margaret, "but the doctor's still
up there. He said it was the acutest case of indigestion he had ever
treated in the whole course of his professional practice."

"Of course _I_ didn't know what he'd do with the dollar," said Robert.

She did not reply.

He began plaintively, "Margaret, you don't----"

"I've never seen papa and mamma so upset about anything," she said,
rather primly.

"You mean they're upset about ME?"

"We ARE all very much upset," returned Margaret, more starch in her tone
as she remembered not only Penrod's sufferings but a duty she had vowed
herself to perform.

"Margaret! YOU don't----"

"Robert," she said firmly and, also, with a rhetorical complexity which
breeds a suspicion of pre-rehearsal--"Robert, for the present I can only
look at it in one way: when you gave that money to Penrod you put into
the hands of an unthinking little child a weapon which mig